With the transition to digital television mandated by the United States government, many manufacturers are actively preparing to deal with a broad range of quality in broadcast and downloaded programming. Many consumers are already confining their video applications to a single unit. In many cases, a computer monitor might support computer applications, down loaded video applications and broadcast television programs. Some families have chosen to utilize a central television for family viewing and computer applications.
A trend has started as more and more families replace their old CRT television with big screen LCD and Plasma televisions with high definition television (HDTV) capabilities. While the new technologies provided better experience with higher resolution and more details, they also reveal more obvious artifacts and noise if the received signals are not of a good enough quality. For instance, displaying YouTube™ video clip on the HDTV will show very ugly coding artifacts caused by the compression algorithm. Technology that can produce superior visual quality on the digital video and image products is highly desirable.
In the current digital video and image standard, block based transformation and quantization of transform coefficients are used to achieve high compression efficiency. Since quantization is a process subject to losing detail, the combination of block based transform and quantization may generate some perceptually annoying artifacts such as blocking artifacts and ringing artifacts.
A blocking artifact may be an artificially induced pattern or intensity change that may be generated when a block of compressed video data is decompressed for display purposes. The blocking artifact, if it is present, will show-up at the boundaries of the decompressed block of video data. As a single block represents only a small portion of a video picture, hundreds or thousands of these blocking artifacts may be present in a single frame of video data. Left unaddressed, these artifacts may ruin the picture completely.
These artifacts may show up on the viewing screen as sharp discontinuities or blurry areas in a textured pattern. Since coding artifacts reduction is fundamental to many image processing applications, it has been investigated for many years.
Many post-processing methods have been proposed. In general, most prior art methods either focus on blocking artifacts reduction or ringing artifacts reduction. To reduce the blocking artifacts, most prior arts methods only focus on the block boundary pixels, the general quantization noise in the middle of the block has not been handled. Also, the de-blocking process depends on the quantization parameter. Obviously, these approaches are not effective. Although some of prior art methods show very good results on the selected applications, they are not good enough for new digital HDTV. As the result, either the artifacts are still visible or the texture detail is blurred.
Many of the consumers have questioned why the original mandate was put in place. With the purchase of a new HDTV, they are not satisfied with the picture quality of many applications that they have enjoyed for some time. Consumers mistakenly believe that their newly purchased HDTV is faulty in some way. The actual culprit is the compression algorithm that was used to process the data for transmission.
Thus, a need still remains for a blocking artifact filter system that can provide a crisp picture without losing the texture detail from the picture. In view of the mandated transition to all digital television broadcast called for by the United States government, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.